William Friedkin, Oscar-winning director of The Exorcist and The French Connection – obituary

William Friedkin, who has died aged 87, enjoyed a brief apotheosis in his Hollywood career as the director of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), two of the most successful films of that decade.

A compelling storyteller and a master technician, Friedkin once declared that his ambition when making a film was to provide “exhilaration”, and he would make famous use of the device of the car chase in The French Connection.

He was not, however, without intellectual pretensions (late in life he claimed to “read continuously” Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu), and sought to explore “a moral zone where good and evil have become almost indistinguishable”, adding: “There is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal. My characters are usually in extremely pressured situations and have few alternatives. Usually their problems are self-created, or created by fate. The mystery of fate fascinates me a great deal. The way I’ve explored that is through the crime genre because it involves tense and pressured situations.”

Until 1970 Friedkin was viewed simply as a precocious talent, but that changed with The French Connection, which is based on the real-life exploits of two New York detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, and their role in what was then the biggest heroin bust in American history. In the early 1960s the two policemen had fortuitously discovered, while off-duty in a nightclub, that a huge shipment of the drug was being imported into the United States.

With a budget of only $1.5 million, the story was set in the present (1971) to avoid spending money on cars, clothes, road signs and hairstyles. Roy Scheider (later star of the first two Jaws films) was hired to play Grosso, while Gene Hackman secured the role of Egan.

Friedkin was famously difficult to work for, and his first meeting with Hackman was not propitious: “He [Hackman] seemed humourless. I almost fell asleep at the lunch. I told Phil [D’Antoni, the producer] there was no way this guy could play Popeye.” There was, however, no obvious alternative. On the first day of shooting, they did 35 takes of one scene with Hackman conducting an interrogation. None was right, and Hackman briefly threatened to quit.

The celebrated chase scene involves Hackman’s character in a car pursuing a hitman who is travelling in an elevated train in New York City. Friedkin was in the back seat of the car operating a hand-held camera as they drove 26 blocks at 90mph, without any safeguards, through busy intersections and red lights. “Pedestrians and cars dashed out of the way, warned only by the oncoming siren,” he recalled. “No one was hurt, thank God.” He later admitted: “I put people’s lives at risk.”

Before filming the sequence, Friedkin had sought permission from the Transit Authority. The man in charge said he would agree, in return for $40,000 and a one-way ticket to Jamaica, because he knew he would be fired (as indeed he was). Another scene involved creating a massive traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, again without proper authorisation.

When the studio bosses attended the first screening, one of them fell asleep; and, to Friedkin’s astonishment and derision, they wanted to name the movie “Popeye”. The French Connection finally opened to enthusiastic reviews and sold-out audiences. It garnered five Oscars: for best director, best picture, best actor, best screenplay based on another medium and best editing; and it was nominated for two others. Friedkin said of his own Oscar: “Winning the Academy Award isn’t everything – it’s the only thing: it’s as important to me as being President.”

Friedkin’s next film really hit paydirt, even if it accumulated less silverware. The Exorcist was inspired by William Peter Blatty’s 1971 bestseller of the same name, about an exorcism in Georgetown, Washington in 1949 – the last time that the rite is thought to have been sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church in the US. One critic called it “one of the most terrifying horror movies ever made”; others called it exploitative, crass and sensationalist. Friedkin claimed that it was a film about “the mystery of faith”.

The possessed child, Regan, was played by Linda Blair, who was only 12 when she took the part. In the film she vomits green fluids (oatmeal, with pea soup for colouring) and masturbates with a bloody crucifix. Some viewers vomited in sympathy, or fainted, or fled the cinema.

In one scene Father Bill O’Malley (a Jesuit high school teacher) was playing a priest administering the last rites but was not displaying sufficient emotion for Friedkin’s taste. So the director “slapped him across the face as hard as I could and pushed him to his knees… I signalled to roll the camera and shouted ‘Action!’ O’Malley burst into tears and performed the scene.” Friedkin (who is said to have fired 70 people on one film alone) later wrote primly: “This is not a solution I recommend to aspiring directors.”

One actor died during the filming of The Exorcist, and a set was destroyed by fire. It took 16 months to complete, and ran millions of dollars over budget. Yet it went on to be one of the highest-grossing pictures in the history of cinema. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, it won two, for sound mixing and adapted screenplay.

Friedkin was now a Hollywood “A-lister”, the owner of a 16-room apartment in Manhattan and a house in Bel Air with the wherewithal to buy expensive art, antique furniture, and the beautiful women for whom he had such an appetite.

William Friedkin was born in Chicago on August 29 1935. His grandparents had emigrated from Kyiv in Ukraine to escape a pogrom in the early 20th century; his father worked in a men’s clothing store while his mother was a nurse. Bill was their only child, and when his father lost his job the small family inhabited a one-room apartment in uptown Chicago.

There was no music, there were no books, and Bill shoplifted from the local candy stores. “We were poor,” he recalled, “but I never knew it. All my friends lived the same way.”

He emerged from Senn High School in 1953 having made no impression except on the basketball court and with the vague notion of becoming a journalist. He got a job in the post room at Chicago’s WGN-TV station, and was soon promoted to floor manager. By the age of 17 he was starting to direct television shows and documentaries.

Then, one afternoon he went to see Citizen Kane. He was “mesmerised”, and watched the film five times that day. His future path was now clear to him, and he absorbed the work of directors such as Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut and Hitchcock.

After moving to WWTW, Chicago’s public broadcasting station, Friedkin heard about the case of Paul Crump, a 32-year-old black man in Cook County Jail awaiting execution for murder. He decided to make a documentary about the case in the hope that he might save him from the electric chair.

The People vs Paul Crump won the major award at the San Francisco Film Festival; Crump’s death sentence was commuted (he was sentenced to life in prison without parole); and Friedkin was invited to sign with the William Morris agency.

Hired to make documentaries for the Wolper Company in Los Angeles, Friedkin broke into feature films with Good Times (1967), about Sonny and Cher, when they were at the height of their popularity. This was followed by The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), inspired by the raid in 1925 on a New York burlesque house, starring Jason Robards, Britt Ekland and Norman Wisdom. The Birthday Party (1968), based on Harold Pinter’s play, and The Boys in the Band (1970) were his next ventures, but none of these was a hit at the box office.

Friedkin’s successes with The French Connection and The Exorcist would not be repeated, and he soon found himself eclipsed by directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Sorcerer (1977), his remake of the 1953 truck-driving drama The Wages of Fear, and The Brinks Job (1978), starring Peter Falk, about a $2.7 million heist in a Boston garage in 1958, failed to excite.

With Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop hunting a serial killer on New York’s gay scene, Friedkin generated a wave of protest in the gay community, who unsuccessfully petitioned New York’s Mayor Koch to refuse a filming permit. In the interests of research, the doughty director (attired accordingly) visited the Mineshaft club on jockstrap night. Meanwhile, Pacino had his hair specially styled by a gay barber, but was so appalled by the result that filming had to be postponed for six weeks while it grew back.

Deal of the Century (1983), a satire on international arms trading, was followed by the more successful To Live and Die in LA (1985), about a Secret Service agent trying to track down his former partner’s killer.

Friedkin’s other films included Rampage (1987); Blue Chips (1994); Jade (1995); Rules of Engagement (2000), starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L Jackson; The Hunted (2003); Bug (2006); and Killer Joe (2011), a distasteful offering which he described as “an edgy black comedy with full frontal nudity and violence”.

Friedkin also worked in television, and directed operas in the United States, Italy, Israel and Austria.

He was married four times: to the French actress Jeanne Moreau (1977-79); to the British star of Upstairs, Downstairs Lesley-Anne Down (1982-85), with whom he had a son; to the American journalist and author Kelly Lange (1987-90); and, from 1991, to Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Pictures. He also had a son with the Australian dancer and choreographer Jennifer Nairn-Smith.

In his memoir, The Friedkin Connection (2013), Friedkin wrote: “I’ve been rude, exercised bad judgment, squandered most of the gifts God gave me… Do I have regrets? You bet.”

William Friedkin, born August 29 1935, died August 7 2023